* A crazy trick was played.

My laptop started speaking to us! It came alive! It said hello and knew our names and answered our questions. Somehow, whenever the kids would run upstairs to get their dad so they could show him that the computer was now sentient, it got really shy. When he left the room to go back to work, the shyness would disappear.

YaYa’s face was incredible. THE COMPUTER WAS TALKING TO US. It was amazing!

Eventually the computer let us know that it is controlled by someone, someone who lives with us, someone who is very tall, and has dreadlocks and is working in programming right now. IT WAS DADDY!

Whoa. That was an event. Daddy was making the computer talk. Daddy’s smart like that.

* Tonight we had purple food. Purples, not greens. Purple cabbage, purple kale, and purple basil. Just for fun. You know.

* It was a day that dragged me around like one of those kids that gets knocked off of the merry go round and bumps along on the ground for a minute before being flung by the playground’s most dangerous toy.

It was a good day. A busy day. And it culminated in Solo throwing a fit in the grocery store, whilst sitting in the cart, flailing his fists around and hitting me in the face, thus knocking my glasses to the ground, where they broke in half. (!)

Oh, my my my. I am not ready for this kid in his twos. He is a different kind, this one.

I squinted around the store holding my broken glasses in my hand, getting ridiculously close to the merchandise in order to see it. Feeling my way around the shelves. The children lost their minds and danced naked in the aisles. I fought back, pelting them with blueberries and roasted almonds. One worker calmly dumped a pint of yogurt on my head, and I came to my senses.

(None of that happened, though, except the part where I couldn’t really see.)

In the car I tried to tape my glasses back together, just so we could get home. I only had electrical tape. It didn’t work very well, but thankfully halfway there we came across Chinua walking home from work, and he drove the rest of the way.

It was one of those magical moments, the ones where you are not sure that you are really awake, or really inhabiting your own body. Did that just happen? you ask.

Remember the dancing! Remember the dancing. I tell myself. My Solo dances. We were at a wedding last weekend and he danced all evening long. He was the last dancer on the floor, one beam of sunlight falling on him, wrists bending and swaying, small torso pumping. He was amazing. Everyone else thought so too, I wasn’t the only one.

He runs to me in the morning and gives me a hug like a mountain would give, if mountains were prone to hugging. He reserves his sweet smile for moments when it will delight people, or smooth things over in a pinch. Oh, but he can be terrible, a tiny monster, if your will crosses his.  He reminds me of YaYa, but in boy form.

And she’s turned out just fine.

To be perfectly honest, on any given day I go through about a hundred different emotions. I’m like some five-year-old girl with outfits. Now the pink dress! Now the leggings with the tinselly t-shirt! Now the overalls!

Except for me it’s Melancholy! Melancholy with a slice of nostalgia! Anger! Self-pity! Overwhelming joy!

It’s exhausting. And, in exhaustion, it’s wise to turn to Matzo Ball Farmer’s Market soup. I once blogged about clean out your fridge soup. Tonight I’m going to tell you what was on our table this evening.

I’m not going to lie. The Farmer’s Market can be expensive for us. But to sum up what I feel about food these days, I’m going to quote Alice Waters in the introduction to her book, The Art of Simple Food. (I’ve just started reading it and I love it.)

“Good food can only come from good ingredients. Its proper price includes the cost of preserving the environment and paying fairly for the labor of the people who produce it. Food should never be taken for granted.”

We have a lot of poorly produced food available to us at very low prices. And that is a tempting thing. But one small thing I’ve learned while in India is that self-denial can be a huge key to appreciation. So if we eat less meat and ice cream and more beans and so are able to afford locally grown vegetables, that little bit of self-denial allows us to support small farmers. And take care of our waistlines, which will thank us for less meat and ice cream. And we then appreciate meat day when it comes around, that much more.

Anyhow. One lesson I’ve learned about Farmer’s Market is that there are a wide variety of costs presented. There are exquisite chocolates and divine honey. Those are treats… oh my word, the honey is good. But if you’re going on a budget, well 80 cents a bunch for kale is not a bad price at all. Kale, summer squash, lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes… you can find really good prices from excellent farms.

Tonight I made Matzo ball soup with leftover chicken bones and an armful of farmer’s market summer vegetables. It was divine. I didn’t measure anything or take photos of the process, but here is the general idea:

I started off by simmering the chicken bones in water for a long time. A few hours, and then straining the bones out of the broth.

My players for simple food (food that is perhaps influenced by European cooking but doesn’t necessarily ascribe to any particular country) are:

Onions
Garlic
Salt
Pepper
Olive Oil
Fresh Herbs

No surprises there. What makes soup fantastic, in my mind, is sautéing everything first. Onions, garlic, vegetables, spices. Tonight I started with the onions and sautéed them until they were soft, added the garlic and cooked it for a  minute or so more.  I then added the following vegetables, one by one, stirring and cooking in between:

3 carrots
2 stalks of celery
1 yellow zucchini
1 large fresh tomato
1 stalk of broccoli

and added salt and pepper. When the vegetables were firm but cooked, I added them to the broth and undertook the task of getting the tiny bits of chicken that were still left off of the bones and into the pot. This is really annoying. I hate that part.

I opened the pack of Matzo ball mix and thanked God once again for his People and the gift of Matzo balls. Putting together the mix was super easy, just eggs and oil and the mix, left to stand for fifteen minutes. While it was standing, I chopped a bunch of kale and added it to the soup, as well as making a chiffonade of a few basil leaves (the herb of the day) from my plant. I turned the soup up and let it really boil for dropping the matzo balls in.

Done! Beautiful, delicious, affordable, delicious, and delicious! But these players can be used with any vegetables you find to make a really good soup. Maybe you use green zucchini, maybe you throw purple cabbage in, maybe you use fresh thyme instead of basil.

I can’t wait to make it again.

P.S. Here’s a post that I wrote at around this time last year.

*Cherries for you to drool over.

*We all have a song on our heads that lists off the various countries in Western Europe. It’s from a book and CD combination called Geography Songs. Seriously excellent homeschool material, since we can’t get it off our brains. We walk around singing “Luxemborg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland…” and so forth.

*Kid A has just successfully destroyed a small sleeping tent that I paid quite a few pennies for. It’s Solo’s, you see. Both of the cribs that I bought for him in India were apparently made of matchsticks, because they fell apart, and then while we were traveling, he was just sleeping on beds, until it drove me mad because of the number of times I had to put him back in bed before he would fall asleep. My friend had one of these for her daughter, and it turned out to be perfect for Solo, until tonight, when Kid A made a Solo-sized hole in the mesh.

Why do boys do stuff like that? Where is the reasoning? Is there any moment when they think: This is needlessly destructive and I’m probably going to be in big trouble?

ARGH.

ARGH.

Okay, I’m over it. We’ll figure it out.

By the way, I highly recommend these tents in place of the back breaking piece of luggage we carried around with us, the dreaded Pack N Play. They keep bugs out too. Just make sure that your seven-year-olds know that ripping holes in them is highly inappropriate. Because you know, IT ISN’T OBVIOUS.

ARGH.

No, no. Moving on.

* I think I tweeted this but didn’t write it here.

I was accepted to the Squaw Valley Community of Writer’s Workshops, which happens from August 7th to 14th. To say that I am excited about this would be a massive understatement.

I am over the moon.

All I need to do now is finish this revision that I’m working on. Being in our own house is helping, but Chinua is working full-time and I am homeschooling, which leaves approximately negative 2 hours a day to become absorbed in writing.I’m working on solving this problem by getting up before the kids. I was getting up at 6:00, but Solo insisted on getting up at 6:30, so now I’ve switched to 5:30.

I also need to find a babysitter and raise the rest of the money for the conference. Tonight I had the brainstorm of doing some babysitting trades. Finding three different families who want to trade a day of babysitting or two. Which will mean that I only have to work off five days of babysitting when I get back. Heh heh.

So my manuscript will be treated by other writers, and I’ll have a chance to read and offer ideas on theirs. My hope is that I’ll learn more about how the book can be helped, and get into the kind of streams that will work toward traditional publication.

We’ll see.

*I ran the first day of the Couch to 5K today. I’m very proud of myself. I’m not exactly a couch potato, but I’m definitely not a runner.

*We had spaghetti for dinner tonight, and I suspect that I put cinnamon in it instead of pepper. By accident. But I couldn’t really tell. I detected a faint cinnamony taste, but maybe I’m having flashbacks of this morning’s oatmeal.

*This concludes my ramble tonight. Have lovely dreams.

To those who are in the house with their kids (and even those who are not) I highly recommend taking an evening walk at the end of the day.

Just get all of yourselves out in the evening air.

Everything will become beautiful again.

Luminous, really. Mysterious and sensory, rather than old and tedious and squabbly.

Your kids will sparkle in the outdoor air. Their cheeks will be so inviting and soft, ready for a squeeze or a smooch. You may sigh and look off into the distance and come back to yourself, back to thankfulness and rest.

You will see them as though they are brand new.

We’re swooping through the ranch to get our stuff out of storage and say hello, and along the way what is better than harvesting a few potatoes and cooking them up for dinner?

Well, it’s true that Tj is way cooler than me, and here’s the proof.

Oobleck. It’s cornstarch and water, mixed with a little food coloring, and I have to say that I shudder away from such mess, but Tj doesn’t. She’s not afraid of a little mess when kids can enjoy themselves like this!

We had a messy day… lots of clothes being changed, lots of dunks in the bath. Oh, oobleck. Oh, basement storage. Oh, muddy hills to slide down. Oh, harvesting chickens.

All I know is that I am plopping these children straight into the van in the morning, before Tj and Mark can get their hands on them again.

Last week Chinua and I signed a lease for an apartment in Santa Cruz, California. We’ll be there for three months.

We signed it and got the keys to the apartment, unloaded a few suitcases and then immediately got back in the van and drove for two days to get to a wedding in Oregon.

We sat on grass and benches and picnic tables and talked to many old friends. We watched our kids playing together. It was such a beautiful weekend. I don’t think I could have dreamed it up, especially on some of the lonelier nights in India.

I am simultaneously longing for my scooter in the jungle and all my stainless steel cups and bowls, and incredibly blessed to be sitting by the fire watching my children talk to the children of my friends. I am dreaming about the farmer’s market in Santa Cruz, and about organic summer squash. I am trying to think of what to furnish the apartment with. (We have a few things, maybe it’s enough.)

I don’t know how to explain how the last few weeks have been. Maybe some of the above will explain it.

I think I’m going to take up jogging.

Meanwhile, check out this picture that my friend took at the wedding, is this ridiculously cute or what?

I am looking for hymns everywhere, because now more than ever I need a song in my mouth.

Everyone who wants to be a superhero thinks that he or she will be able to swim upstream, against the deafening flow of the current, away from the direction we are all being taken, not entirely within our will.

I find myself leaning against depression and being overwhelmed by this culture. Instead of making conversation, I am mute in public. Just swept along. Just in that loneliest herd; all the cars on the freeway. I thought I could swim against the current, but it turns out that the swell was so big that it tossed me deep into the earth. It is so different here, so different from the small space I found for myself among a billion people in India.

My own bent toward melancholy is something I march against every day of my life. I am deeply joyful and deeply sad. Disturbed. It’s why I can’t watch disturbing movies, there is too much under there that is already roiled and seething.

So I’ve been walking. Okay, Rae, maybe it was too much to think you could be a superhero, but how about taking a walk everyday?

Okay.

On the first night there were the donkeys. And then the second time, in a different town, I walked to the beach and there they were. Pelicans.

And oh how they dove. Oh I wish I could dive like that, throw myself toward the water and cut into it until it pours off and I take flight again. They were incredible. I sat and watched them for a long while, sat in the sand beside the platter of a moon and watched them dive, and dive, and dive.

The night before last I went walking to the beach again, and this time there were no pelicans, but it was okay because my heart was already thrumming with the music of the Brazilian drum troupe that somehow had appeared on the sand. Why so many Brazilian people were gathered on the beach, playing drums and dancing, I’m not sure. (Maybe something to do with the World Cup?) All I know is that it was another step into reorienting myself in the world. I danced a little, just a little. I sat and smiled into the waves. I sat and smiled and smiled.

We are a gathering people. We need connection. We need to stop the current of isolation, to swim against it with all the power our little fat, torn up salmon bodies have. Or dive into it, cut through it and feel it falling off of us.

There is such a huge difference between solitude and isolation. Solitude is something you seek, to find rest and quiet within yourself, to be with God. Isolation is a lack of ability to touch or hear anyone around you. It is a scary place.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t need time to walk, to muse, to watch pelicans and pat little knee-high donkeys on their heads. To speak with God to say thank you and i love you i love you again and again. And help me, because i don’t know where exactly i am. Because it has nothing to do with isolation, it has to do with the reorientation with that we need, to hear the earth and the heartbeat of God.

The current doesn’t even touch Him.

It’s not the easiest thing to recap the adventures of a week. I’ll try.

We were staying with some friends outside of Sacramento. It’s the coolest thing when you know people for years and years and you have two little girl babies who are only three weeks apart, and one thing, you’re at a Mother’s Day party with your tiny newborns, sleepless and exhausted and happy, and next thing you know…

Bam!

They’re six! And that means dressing alike in any way they can, as in the photo above and…

and

It even includes water wings. But that water was a little cold for my kids who are used to the Arabian Sea.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Our hosts did an excellent job of showing us around, which is no easy feat, since sometimes hosting us feels like this:

We stayed in Chrys’s studio. She’s a magnificent artist, so every night it was sort of like going to sleep in a beautiful dream world and my dreams were filled with charcoals and oils.  Her site is here. (On the left is a grid and the fifth painting from the top on the left hand side is called Transfiguration. That’s my favorite, though they’re all beautiful.)

This is Jacob. He drives this crazy thing:

Sometimes with kayaks.

We all went to the lake nearby. Oh golly, the fun!

It was hot in Sacramento.

Kid A did some kayaking while anchored by a rope that Jacob was holding. It was pretty cool for him. YaYa went out the same way, and Leafy went on Chrys’s lap. Chrys and I took the kayaks out and saw mud swallows under the bridge on the columns, a hundred feet up. Between the swallows and the glimmering sparks of the light on the water on the way back, it was heavenly. I need a kayak.

These boys watched very seriously.

Our friends have made this wonderland of strawberry plants and a veggie garden and ridiculously fragrant herb garden, as well as bunnies and chickens and turkeys, all in their backyard. The girls played with the bunnies, and Kid A helped his friend feed the animals every day.

All in all we managed to keep cool and have a lot of fun.

Jacob and Chinua also put skins on drums and spent a lot of time playing them.  It was a beautiful time. I’m very thankful.

I went for a very long walk today and I found a tree.

And some miniature donkeys. They were very friendly.

And I found the moon.

All of those things were beautiful to me.  The evening air almost drove me wild. It reminded me of dusk in the summer in Edmonton, far north when the trees let down their heat and the lit windows had me peering inside them. When I was a dreaming child. When I believed that I may one day overcome this unraveling self of mine.

Who knows, maybe I still will.

A word from Leafy:

“What if Star Wars was really Animal Star Wars and Darth Vader was Darth Camel?” (He stares off, thinking.) “And Luke Skywalker was Luke Puppy?”

*

I hear that all of the money for the truck was raised, Hallelujah. Perhaps some of you donated without letting us know. Thank you.

I’m glad for those kids. I’m sure they can use every blessing they can get.

*

I’m back and feeling refreshed. Ready for the long haul. I’ve been thinking about gypsies. Real ones. The kids and I have been reading about them.

We’ve been traveling from home to home, welcome everywhere we go, loved, welcomed with open arms.

But imagine being a traveling family and not being welcome. Being reviled. Looked down upon.

It gives me a sense of perspective.

(Photo of Gypsy Woman by Chinua)